


when the autumn moon is bright

by callunavulgari



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-27 23:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12593388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: There weren’t, strictly speaking, supposed to be wolves in Atlantis.





	when the autumn moon is bright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [popkin16](https://archiveofourown.org/users/popkin16/gifts).



> For popkin16, who made a post a couple days ago about wanting new mcshep werewolf fic. Sure, my brain said when I saw the post yesterday at 8 o'clock, I can definitely finish that before Halloween is over. I could not, in fact, finish before Halloween was over. One day, I'm going to actually allow one of the fics that want to be a 50k novel turn into a 50k novel. Today is not that day.
> 
> I've based the werewolves in this universe off of the werewolves in Hemlock Grove, which are delightfully gross and creepy.

There weren’t, strictly speaking, supposed to be wolves in Atlantis. That’s what John is told later.

It was agreed upon that sending a werewolf through the gate to a planet that’s lunar cycle was largely unknown was an awful idea. Lone wolves, a fae scientist tells him nervously, tended to be aggressive, flighty, and sending an entire pack was out of the question.

So, no werewolves. It’s okay, they assured him. It wasn’t discrimination, because they hadn’t allowed vampires either.

The personnel chosen for the Atlantis expedition had been hand-picked carefully. They’d had months to prepare, to pack, to get to know each other. They hadn’t accounted for John showing up so late, a wild card with a gift - a gene - too good to pass up, whose paperwork was rushed through the day before the expedition was due to step through the gate. How somehow, somebody had missed the fact that he’d checked the little box next to ‘werewolf’ on all his forms.

John looked down at Elizabeth, and blinked placidly. “So what exactly are you planning to do with me? Send me back?”

Elizabeth licked her lips.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

 

  
Growing up, John had an entire forest to himself. His family was old blood. Wolf blood, they called it, all the way back for generations. Old blood, old connections, old money.

On nights when the moon was full he would carefully cross the grounds, bare feet moving silently across cold grass, the soil pressing wetly between his toes. When he reached the tree line, he would shed his pajamas and stand there, alone, until the moon crested the horizon.

He knew that there were wolves like him that didn’t have forests, who made do with getting shot at outside of werewolf-approved parks. Who skulked in back alleys, their bellies low to the ground, muzzles shoved deep into trash cans for even a scrap of food. That there were creatures who had it worse off than even those wolves - vampires who starved themselves until they went mad, goblins who never showed their face to the outside world, old gods who dried up from a lack of offerings, djinn who grew so old and world-weary that they forgot who they were.

He was one of the lucky ones, even though his father hadn’t run with him since he was a boy, since his mother got mistaken for a rabid and some nice hunter put a bullet through her skull. His father was never home during full moons and Dave shut himself away in his room.

John ran.

He hunted sometimes, little shapes of rabbits and squirrels tearing away from the safety of their trees and burrows when he got too near. The temptation to give chase was a strong one, so when he was bored, he would pelt through the forest after them, their tiny bones crunching between his teeth when he finally caught them.

Atlantis was not a forest.

Atlantis was metal and people smells, crowded everywhere, so John caged himself away in his rooms whenever his teeth itched with the change. He curled up on his bed and slept, nose tucked under the tip of his tail.

The first time, John hadn’t made it back to his room in time. The higher ups were right to be concerned about lunar cycles, he’d thought, staggering against a wall and squinting down the corridor. His vision tunneled, his skin itching as his mouth filled with blood. He spat a molar onto the floor and tried to think, tried to breathe through the pain of holding off the change.

He’d bitten clear through his lip in an effort to steer off the change, but it hadn’t been enough.

The next morning he’d woken up in Rodney McKay’s bed, his wolf skin a steaming pile of meat beside him. Rodney had squinted over at him, sleepily at first, and looked from John to the mass of fur and viscera, nose wrinkling in disgust.

“That’s really gross,” he’d said, and rolled, putting his back to John and the mess both. “You’re washing my sheets.”

Then he’d simply gone back to sleep.

 

  
Rodney never opens up about the experience, so John doesn’t ask. It isn’t often that he wakes up not remembering the change, but since Rodney seems unconcerned and clearly intact, John lets it slide.

The next month, John is more careful. He makes sure to count the days, keeping his eye on the sky, and when the next moon rolls around, John is already sequestered into his room, a chilled slab of meat on a plate and a pile of blankets on his bed to keep him company.

He remembers everything about the night except for how Rodney gets there.

“Look, Sheppard,” Rodney starts waspishly, the one and only time that John tries to ask about it. It’s been four moon cycles and each morning John has woken up with Rodney at his side. “You needed help and my room was there. It was a no brainer.”

“But-”

Rodney shoots him a quelling look, his eyes bloodshot and shadowed. John shuts his mouth with a click and doesn’t ask again.

 

  
Rodney McKay, they tell him when he asks, is almost entirely human. There’s a bit of dragon on his father’s side, far enough back in the family tree that it’s largely agreed upon that the only thing he appears to have inherited from that is his legendary temper and his tendency to hoard food. More curiously though is the bit of morgen on his mother’s side, recent enough to have been a direct result of a grandmother.

Nobody was too concerned about it, since having someone with the blood of water spirits running through their veins seemed like a good thing to have. And besides, he was told flippantly, it wasn’t as if it seemed to have manifested in Rodney at all.

John wasn’t so sure. He’d never met a water spirit before, but he’d dated a siren once and they never seemed to possess the traits that people expected them to have. Rodney might not have the teeth, the ethereal beauty, or even the singing voice, but nobody could say that he wasn’t captivating in his own right.

His eyes are the bluest that John has ever seen.

John catches Rodney looking at him sometimes when the others aren’t watching. It’s not awful, mostly because Rodney doesn’t look at John like he’s a monster. It’s an odd sort of look, heat and affection, a little annoyance. It confuses him.

The first couple months, John doesn’t know what to feel about Rodney. He’s loud, arrogant, and a bit of a coward, but John wakes up in his bed once a month with his brain still half animal and feels safe.

The first time that Rodney saves his life, something quiet and heavy settles between his ribs, a warm content ball of some emotion that John is out of practice with feeling. Rodney, John realizes, is beginning to nudge his way into the quiet, near-empty part of John’s brain that equates to pack.

Back in Afghanistan, John had slept among his brothers - some men who were wolf, some who weren’t - and felt the too full glow that he’d half-forgotten. Humans were afraid of wolves more than most other creatures, but they were even more afraid of the ones that didn’t have a pack. Wolves like John, who ran and hunted by themselves.

In Afghanistan, his brothers had run with him. Had flown with him.

And he’d lost it.

Lost them to heat and blood and guts, to gunfire and enemy wolves.

In Atlantis, Rodney isn’t the only one moving into that space. Others - Elizabeth, Teyla, Ford, Carson - they all exist there, in that quiet corner of his brain, some way or another.

John tries not to fear it. He wakes up with Rodney’s scent in his nose, his all-too-human head buried in the crook of Rodney’s shoulder. This close, Rodney smells a bit like the sea.

He runs.

 

  
John sleeps with a girl. He touches her hair, her eyelids, strokes fingers down her velvety sides, and mouths at the curve of her throat. She doesn’t flinch from him, doesn’t question the way he moves too surely in the darkness. Doesn’t shy away from his strength.

She doesn’t smell right.

At breakfast the next morning, Rodney glares at him, but says nothing.

John doesn’t reach for her again.

 

  
“Move your furry ass, Sheppard,” someone is saying, grunting heavily with effort, when John comes to. Something is shoving hard against his side, fingers digging hard into fur and muscle. John growls and snaps half-heartedly at the fingertips. Someone yelps.

It’s another beat before the hand touches him again, the fingers hesitant as they nudge up against his side. He can hear someone swallow hard. Their heart is pounding.

“John,” they whisper urgently, “please.”

There’s something in the woods with them, John thinks, blinking his eyes open. He can hear it, moving slowly on two feet, stomping a path through the leaves. John is quicker, stealthier than it is, but still he fears it.

“John,” the someone says again, and when John turns to look, the someone resolves into Rodney crouched over him. There’s blood on his face and he stinks of sour fear. When he sees John focusing on him, his face crumples with relief.

“Oh thank god,” he gasps, fingers curling harder into John’s fur. “I thought- they hit you with that thing and you changed, I wasn’t sure-”

John can’t tell Rodney that it will be okay, not like this, not with words anyway, so he tries to push himself up, his legs trembling underneath him. He pants shallowly, and gets sick in the bushes, retching up something awful.

“Oh god,” Rodney says.

That thing is still in the forest. John can hear it, getting closer. He stumbles when he tries to take a step, catching himself against Rodney’s hip and resting there until he can quell the nausea long enough to take another. Gently, he captures Rodney’s hand between his teeth and tugs.

It takes another minute before Rodney follows slowly, _loudly_ , and in that time John stumbles twice more, shoulders crashing into tree trunks.

“I really wish you could talk right now,” Rodney tells him as he's crunching along after John, in serious danger of stepping on his tail more than once. He has one hand on John's flank, steadying himself. It's threatening to knock John even further off kilter, but he doesn't shake it loose.

John flattens his ears and growls at him. He wishes that he could talk too.

He takes them as far as he can with his own awkward, swaying gait and Rodney’s too loud footsteps. When he finds a cave at long last, John collapses, dropping heavily onto his side and panting in the darkness. The place smells like old fur and bones, but there’s been nothing new for weeks. Maybe months. Safe.

Rodney hesitates beside him, his hands held out in the darkness.

“Sheppard?” he asks, squinting down at John. “Are you all right?”

John wants to snarl at him, wishes he knew what the hell happened. He doesn’t even have the energy to growl a response so instead, he snuffles at Rodney’s pant leg, pressing his cold nose to the skin that he finds there. He licks, gets the taste of salt and person and Rodney before Rodney yelps and pulls away.

“I’m hoping that’s a yes,” Rodney says, dropping to the ground beside him. He fumbles around in his pack until he finds what he’s looking for and pulls out a canteen of water, half-full. He takes a sip, nothing like the greedy gulps that he would have taken months ago, when all this was new to him.

When he’s done drinking Rodney cups a careful hand around the lip of the canteen and pours a small bit into it, quietly offering the handful of water to John. When John looks at him, Rodney rolls his eyes. “It’s this or the floor, don’t be picky.”

John laps carefully at the water, the flat of his tongue dragging against the palm of Rodney’s hand. He lays his head down beside Rodney’s knee when he’s done, settling his bulk against Rodney side.

“So,” Rodney says into the quiet. “Any ideas on how to change you back?”

John doesn’t whimper. He can’t bark at Rodney for asking stupid questions and he can’t ask Rodney what happened in the first place, so he shuts his eyes and tries to force the change.

It feels like getting hit by a train, his insides twisting with sharp pain, and John makes a quiet, pained noise, and retches up the water. Rodney’s fingers are in his fur again, stroking a slow, comforting line down his spine.

“Okay,” Rodney says, licking his lips. John can smell the fear on him. “I’m guessing that means you can’t turn back.”

John wheezes and tries again.

And again.

By the fifth try, John is drooling blood, wavering on four legs until Rodney succeeds at getting him to lie down. His head feels like it’s going to explode, his insides cramping strangely. There’s a creeping sense of panic there, but mostly, John feels tired.

He can’t hear the thing in the woods anymore.

“It’s okay,” Rodney is saying, his voice almost soothing. His hand is still on John’s flank, petting him so smoothly that John doesn’t think he even realizes he’s doing it. “It’ll be okay, we’ll figure it out in the morning.”

The next morning, when John tries to change back again, he almost succeeds. He gets close, so damn close, his entire body shaking with the effort, his legs weak, insides _boiling_ \- and then he collapses. He lies on the ground for a good long while, long enough for Rodney to finish waking up.

“John?” Rodney whispers, crouching over him. He sounds afraid. Carefully, he touches his fingers to the corner of John’s eye, and when he pulls them away to show him, they’re wet, red with blood.

“Okay,” he says, his voice shaking. “Maybe not so easy of a fix.”

 

  
It takes them three weeks to fix him, even after Teyla’s found them and gotten them back to Atlantis. By the end of those three weeks, John is beginning to forget what it feels like to be human. He paces back and forth in Rodney’s rooms, in the labs after dark, when the rest of the scientists have gone to sleep.

Rodney touches his back between the shoulders. He smells like pack. Like Rodney and sweat and salt water. He makes John feel safe.

 

 

The first thing that John does when he’s on two feet again is stumble blindly in the direction of his bedroom. He wakes up in Rodney’s bed twelve hours later, with Rodney staring bemusedly down at him.

“So,” he says slowly, plucking a bit of lint from John’s hair. He’s smiling and he smells good. “Is this going to happen often?”

John makes an inarticulate noise into the pillow, pushing up into Rodney’s hand unthinkingly. It’s only when Rodney begins to stroke back his hair the way he had his fur that John realizes what he’s doing.

John carefully doesn’t pull away. He licks his lips and says, in a creaking voice, “Do you mind?”

Rodney eyes him for a moment, then shrugs. “Didn’t before. At least this time I didn’t wake up to a pile of gore.”

John kicks him weakly, one leg still stuck in the blanket. Mutters, “Can’t help that.”

Something in Rodney gentles. “Yeah, I know. It’s still gross though.”

John snorts, worming his way under the blankets, until he’s pressed fully against Rodney’s side. Rodney’s hand freezes in his hair, his body going still. John thinks that he might just now be realizing that John’s naked.

It takes a good minute before his hand starts moving again, sliding slowly from John’s hair and grazing gently along the curve of his skull down to the nape of his neck. His trailing fingers come to a stop between John’s shoulderblades, stroking there as if marvelling at the feel of skin instead of fur.

John arches up into the touch, a noise making its way out of his mouth. It’s a quiet noise, very human.

He waits for Rodney to freeze up again, but he never does.

“So that’s a yes, then?” Rodney asks, his hand skimming down John’s back to stroke along his side. The palm of his hand settles against the sharp jut of John’s hip, fingers splayed low across John’s belly. When he speaks again, his voice is lower, closer, right in John’s ear. “To you ending up in my bed, furry or otherwise?”

John has to lick his lips twice to answer.

“Yes,” he gasps, and turns in Rodney’s arms to face him. This close, it’s impossible to mistake the heat pressed against his thigh. Impossible not to smell the want on him. John takes a quick quelling breath in through his nose and leans in to press a careful kiss to the corner of Rodney’s mouth. He pulls back to look at him, asks, “Okay?”

Rodney’s eyes are wide in the darkness. He wets his lips.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> For those interested, my [main blog](http://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/) and my [writing blog](http://callunawrites.tumblr.com/). :)


End file.
